Bradford Bishop allegedly murders five of his family members in Bethesda, Maryland. The crime goes undiscovered for 10 days and the suspect is never caught. In 2014, he is placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

March 14 – After eight years on NBC, The Wizard of Oz returns to CBS, where it will remain until 1999, setting what was likely then a record for the most telecasts of a Hollywood film on a commercial television network. That record is broken by The Ten Commandments in 1996, which began its annual network telecasts on ABC in 1973 and is still (as of 2016) telecast by that network.

Conrail (Consolidated Rails Corporation) is formed by the U.S. government, to take control of 13 major Northeast Class-1 railroads that had filed for bankruptcy protection. Conrail takes control at midnight, as a government-owned and operated railroad until 1986, when it is sold to the public.

Tiananmen Incident: Large crowds lay wreaths at Beijing's Monument of the Martyrs to commemorate the death of Premier Zhou Enlai. Poems against the Gang of Four are also displayed, provoking a police crackdown.

April 29 – Sino-Soviet split: A concealed bomb explodes at the gates of the Soviet embassy in China, killing four Chinese.[1] The targets were embassy employees, returning from lunch, but on that day they returned to the embassy earlier.[1]

The Judgment of Paris pits French vs. California wines in a blind taste-test in Paris, France. California wines win the contest, surprising the wine world and opening the wine industry to newcomers in several countries.

Twenty-six Chowchilla schoolchildren and their bus driver are abducted and buried in a box truck within a quarry in Livermore, California. The captives dig themselves free after 16 hours. The quarry-owner's son and two accomplices are arrested for the crime.

American criminal Gary Gilmore is arrested for murdering two men in Utah.

July 21 – An IRA bomb kills Christopher Ewart-Biggs, British ambassador to the Irish Republic, and Judith Cooke, a Northern Ireland Office private secretary; two others are seriously wounded but survive.

August 2 – A gunman murders Andrea Wilborn and Stan Farr and injures Priscilla Davis and Gus Gavrel, in an incident at Priscilla's mansion in Fort Worth, Texas. T. Cullen Davis, Priscilla's husband and one of the richest men in Texas, is tried and found innocent for Andrea's murder, involvement in a plot to kill several people (including Priscilla and a judge), and a wrongful death lawsuit. Cullen goes broke afterwards.

August 5 – The Great Clock of Westminster (or Big Ben) suffers internal damage and stops running for over 9 months.

August 6 – Former UK Postmaster General John Stonehouse is sentenced to 7 years' jail for fraud, theft and forgery.

September 24 – Patty Hearst is sentenced to seven years in prison for her role in a 1974 bank robbery (an executive clemency order from U.S. President Jimmy Carter will set her free after only 22 months).

September 25 – Irish rock band U2 is formed after drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. posts a note seeking members for a band on the notice board of his Dublin school.

In San Francisco, during his second televised debate with Jimmy Carter, U.S. President Gerald Ford stumbles when he declares that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" (there is at the time).

The Early Academic Outreach Program (EAOP) is established by the University of California (UC) in response to the State Legislature's recommendation to expand post-secondary opportunities to all of California’s students including those who are first-generation, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and English-language learners.[6]